The Age of
Nonjudgmentalism

June 26,
2007

[Originally published by the Universal Press
Syndicate,
May 5, 1998]

Lets not mince words:
Things just keep getting worse.

The
U.S. government doesnt have to worry
about making profits; it can take unlimited amounts of money from the
American people. Yet it has managed to fall more than $5
trillion in debt. And it still presumes to tell others how they should
run their businesses.

For most of
this nations existence, its rulers didnt even have to use the
word billion, unless they were discussing astronomy. Now they are up
to multiple trillions. At the present rate, theyre going to have to
come up with an equivalent of light-years as a shorthand for units of
federal spending. The word astronomical will assume connotations of
parsimony, as in This heartless skinflint wants to cut Medicare back
to astronomical levels!

This has
become a country in which Thomas Jefferson couldnt get elected
mayor of a medium-sized city, let alone president, yet Bill Clinton goes right
to the top  with high approval ratings. It used to be a country where
high-school students learned Latin and Greek; today its college students take
remedial English and can listen to Cliffs Notes on audiotape.
And were told our best days lie ahead of us!

Am I
complaining? Yes, but not for myself. I was lucky. The worst thing I ever had
to worry about in school was being beaten up by bigger kids. Nobody even
thought about bringing a gun to school. We had fewer laws, but they were
enforced. Today the people who dont want to enforce existing laws
are always eager to make new ones.

We baby
boomers may be the first generation in history that can tell our juniors how
easy we had it. In our day it was still unusual to come from a broken
home; nowadays many kids have never lived in any other kind, since
their parents didnt bother getting married in the first place.
Sports Illustrated has just done a cover story on
multimillionaire athletes who have kids out of wedlock, ignore them, and
often try to avoid paying a few bucks in child support.

Meanwhile,
queer studies have become fashionable at the university level,
and a noted Shakespeare scholar has saluted gay and lesbian
theorists as men and women of the greatest independence of
mind. Which just goes to show that you not only have to accept
change; you also have to pretend, with a silly smile, that the new way of life
is a big improvement over the old one.

In
every generation, were always reminded, there are old codgers
yearning for the good old days and denouncing the degenerate youth around
them. But the old days werent this bad, and its moral insanity
to deny it. Whats more, todays youth arent to blame
for the changes; theyre the victims of trendy elders who have
abdicated both authority and responsibility. When bishops go ape,
dont expect children to behave like little angels.

Its all
summed up in the word judgmental. This idiotic word says it all: the
final censure of a relativist age. Its wrong to say anything is wrong.
You must be punished for advocating punishment.

Egad. We live
in the Age of Nonjudgmentalism, eloquently attested in Clintons
approval ratings. I expect to see an ominous bumper sticker any day now:
Im nonjudgmental and I vote!

Can it be an
accident that back when people were more judgmental, they didnt
shoot each other quite so often? It may seem paradoxical, but its
quite natural. Simple, even. When you have commonly accepted moral
standards, you dont usually need to resort to force. But when moral
rebuke no longer exerts its restraining influence, there is a human
temptation to blow the offending party away, as it were.

I realize that
to say that things keep getting worse is highly judgmental. So maybe I should
say that they keep getting worse from a judgmental point of view. From a
nonjudgmental perspective, of course, everything is fine.

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